During the firefight, “I didn’t think I was going to die; I knew I was dead,” Meyer writes. “I had gone somewhere else. I wasn’t firing the machine gun; I was the machine gun.”

Coming home, separating the Marine fighting for his life and his gun, was harder. Meyer’s struggles after the shooting stops are some of the most compelling passages in the book. In them, the sniper and hunter of men becomes human.

Fearing a desk job because of his combat stress, Meyer does not re-enlist in his beloved Corps. After he leaves the military, he is a loner without a mission, staring down demons that creep in at night when his only backup is his best friend Jack Daniels.

Meyer holds a gun to his head and pulls the trigger, trying to do what swarms of enemy fighters in Ganjgal could not. But someone has removed the bullet he keeps in the chamber.

The clinic that treated him for post-traumatic stress saves his life, Meyer says. Later, he finds solace in work as a motivational speaker and fundraiser for the Marine Corps Scholarship Foundation.

Meyer was scheduled to speak this month at a veterans job fair in San Diego called Hiring Our Heroes. He didn’t make it. A few days earlier, Meyer was injured in a drunken brawl at a party in his hometown of Columbia, Ky. An 18-year-old farmworker was charged with assaulting him.

Meyer expects to feel everlasting regret over the friends he lost in Afghanistan. “The Marine Corps teaches you about not trying, but about doing, and I didn’t get there in time,” he writes, apologizing to their families.

When his commander-in-chief slips the medal over his neck, Meyer looks grim. “As a Marine, you either bring your team home alive or you die trying. My country was recognizing me for being a failure and for the worst day of my life.”

Meyer can’t seem to escape Ganjgal. But an encounter on the road home to his family farm shows the way out.

Meyer sees an overturned pickup, its engine smoking like it had been hit with a rocket-propelled grenade. He pulls over and runs low toward the truck, as if evading enemy fire.

Meyer wrenches open the door and finds the young driver covered in blood. He hauls him out and uses a belt for a tourniquet.

“Am I going to die? Am I going to be all right?” the man pleads.

“You’ll be fine,” Meyer says. Looking back, he writes: “the smell of his blood, the weight of his body in my arms ... It was a release. It felt very good to help save someone.”